HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [16]
We’re not so different, you and I. We both dominate. We both kick ass. We both have excellent taste. You are eating me, for instance, and I would eat you, too. I will eat you. Don’t forget, I’m still going to win. But you are a worthy opponent, Mister Bear. I salute you. In a different time and a different place I’m sure we would have been great friends.
6
Oh science, oh technology, oh medicine and pharmacology, how much do I love you? Let me count … OxySufnix, Percoset, Anctil, Smarmex: you take the pain away and bring me cool fluffy clouds and ultimate smoothness. Performil, Septihone, Winnerol: you remove my doubts and confusion and give me clarity. Sombutol, Codeine, Abnap: you tuck me in and turn out my lights. Ritalin, Rapidol, Viagra, Crystal Methedrine: you put my pedal to the metal. There’s no feeling I ever wanted to feel that the alchemists of modern pharmacy don’t already have a pill for. Drugs, I’m so glad you’re here with me. I couldn’t do this without you. It was very smart of me to stock up on you in Vancouver, where you are available so cheaply and without a prescription.
Of course I have a prescription. I’m not some twitchy pill-popper. I have several good doctors telling me to take this stuff. That’s how I know they’re good doctors. Edna dragged me one time to see this bad doctor, a real quack, who tried to prescribe me some analysis, some deep probing of my past, some couch time. I told this doctor, Hey Doctor, do you know who I am? I’m Marv Pushkin, and I’m stunningly important! Do I look like I have time to lie there in the greasy indentation left on your fake leather couch by the fat asses of a hundred depressive clients of yours, telling you private details from my fabulous life? You wish! If you don’t have a pill for whatever you’re diagnosing me with, then maybe you should diagnose me with something else, something more physical and real and less effervescent and psychological and gay. I’m not paying $100 an hour to sit around un-medicated in your office and weep — boo hoo hoo — about my funny urges and my goofy outbursts and my wacky, zany, nutty “problems.” If I’m sick, I have an illness, not a “problem.” Nobody has “problems” any more, they have pills for that now. So give me the pill or tell me who will.
So the pain pills, obviously, are for my pain. What pain? I haven’t felt real painful pain in years. Pain, to me, is like an unsolicited e-mail from my nervous system, trying to sell me something I’m not even slightly interested in. I might read it if I’m bored, otherwise I trash it with a single click. Right now those e-mails are really stuffing my inbox, but I’m ignoring them.
I remember the bad old days of pain, pain that hurt. I had these headaches, sure, once upon a time. That was some real pain. Do you imagine being eaten by a bear is painful? Imagine instead if a tiny rodent, a rat with long teeth and sharp scratching claws, woke up in the center of your brain and started burrowing its way out your face. Imagine pain you can hear, crawling around inside your skull with every twitch of your eyebrow, searing the inside of your head like acid. Imagine your head is one big tooth, and it’s got an abscess. Oh yes, it was bad, but now it’s good, oh yes. I can hardly imagine pain now. I’m so over pain, thanks to OxySufnix. OxySufnix, I owe you a beer.
Then there was that other problem, the one that quack doctor wanted to apply couches to. I wasn’t depressed or anything, I was just great. I had been taking the OxySufnix for six months and life was good, I was high on life, life and OxySufnix. I mean, I’m even better now, but really I was fine then. I felt excellent, so excellent that one day, carried away in general enthusiasm, I playfully emptied my 9mm Glock 19 all over the house and did a lot of damage, shot holes in some fairly valuable possessions, burned some stuff, I just went, I went, I went, well not nuts. Never went nuts. I felt just